Why has Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions moved the default mount points from /media to /media/$USER
Example I plug in a USB drive and it's name is EXT4-250GB-USB it used to show up in /media/EXT4-250GB-USB but now it shows up in /media/z/EXT4-250GB-USB
Why is this and what's the reason behind it?
In fact, Ubuntu as many other Linux distributions have switched to udisks2 which is used for the auto mount feature.
In the new version of udisks, the default mount point is /run/media/$USER, but it has been patched by Ubuntu (and some other distributions) to be /media/$USER (See this answer from Florian Diesch for more details).
udisks version 2.0.0, which is included in Ubuntu 12.10 doesn't allow you to change the default behaviour which is mounting a file system as non-shared (only accessible by $USER).
Since udisks 2.0.91, it is possible to change the default behaviour so that mounting a file system as shared can be done as before [/media] (See this answer from rocko for more details).
The root cause for this change of default behaviour in udisks2 seems clear : the security. It is safer to restrict access to a file system to one particular user instead of giving access to it to all the users of the system.
